Manually update and configure desktops for Office 365

Article
07/22/2014

Applies to: Project Server 2013

As an administrator for Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses, you should ensure that your users’ desktop computers are updated and configured for use with Office 365. Your users will be able to use their user ID to sign in to Office 365 from their desktop applications.

You can ensure that your users’ desktop computers are set up for Office 365 in one of two ways:

Have your users update and configure their desktops themselves: See Set up your desktop for Office 365.
Manually install the necessary updates for your users: By manually setting up your users’ computers, you can choose the best time to update and configure your infrastructure, you can complete the task in stages, and you can save bandwidth during peak business hours. To learn more about manually distributing product updates for Office 2010 and 2007 Office system, see the following:
- Distribute product updates for Office 2010
- Distribute product updates for the 2007 Office system

This topic walks you through how to manually set up your users’ computers for use with Office 365; you can complete the tasks in any order.

What do you want to do?

Manually install updates
Manually configure desktop applications

Manually install updates

To manually install the updates to your users’ desktops, see this wiki post: Manually install Office 365 desktop updates.

Manually configure desktop applications

Manually configure Microsoft Outlook

Important

If you want to use your own domain name instead of the namespace you received when you signed up for Office 365, then before you configure Outlook, you’ll need to create a CNAME record at the DNS hosting service for your domain. For more information, see Enable Outlook to Connect to Outlook Live.

For steps on how to manually configure Microsoft Outlook for your users, see Connect Outlook to This Account.

Manually configure Lync

If your users have been provisioned for Lync and they have Microsoft Office Communicator subscriptions, then you can manually configure Lync for those users. You can do this by modifying the following Office Communicator registry settings for each provisioned user under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared\UcClient:

Set ServerSipUri to a string value of the user’s SIP proxy address
Set ConfigurationMode to a dword value of 0
Delete the ServerAddressInternal string
Delete the ServerAddressExternal string
Delete the ServerUserName string

Manually configure SharePoint Online

If your users have been provisioned for SharePoint Online and they have Internet Explorer 7, Windows Internet Explorer 8, or Internet Explorer 9 installed on their computers, then you can manually configure SharePoint Online for those users. You can do this by modifying the following SharePoint Online registry settings for each provisioned user under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains:

Add a key for the SharePoint Online domain.
Add a subkey to the newly added domain key for your company’s SharePoint Online home site.
Add a dword named https and set it to a value of 2.

Note

The SharePoint Online Host Name is added to the Trusted Sites zone in Internet Explorer after you have modified the registry settings.